On Alaska – Judy Maltz in Haaretz:
‘Deep in their hearts, even if they won't say it out loud, many Jews have been pondering this painful question since October 7: Has the Zionist project – the establishment of an independent Jewish state in the Land of Israel – failed? After all, wasn't the point of having a state of their own that there would be at least one place on Earth where they could feel protected and live freely? After so many Israelis were abandoned by their government on that horrendous day – with more than a hundred hostages still rotting in Hamas tunnels nearly a year later – and with civil liberties in jeopardy as never before under Israel's far-right government, it is only natural to question whether Jewish self-determination is all it was cracked up to be. Perhaps the Zionist dream could have taken other forms? Might it not have worked out better had this experiment been conducted in safer places?’
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‘Arguably the most famous of all was the British plan to create a Jewish homeland in a part of British East Africa. The proposed territory then belonged to Uganda and is now part of Kenya. Conceived by British Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain, the plan was presented by Theodor Herzl, the founding father of Zionism, to the 1903 World Zionist Congress held in Basel.’
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‘Nonetheless, a majority of the delegates voted in favor of sending a fact-finding mission to British East Africa to check out the viability of the idea. At the next congress, two years later, the proposal was rejected. But the idea that Jewish sovereignty did not require a specific piece of land would live on. Its supporters would eventually establish the Jewish Territorialist Organization.
Founded by the British writer and activist Israel Zangwill, this new "territorialist" movement advocated for the creation of a Jewish homeland wherever land was available. Various attempts to locate land for such an endeavor (including in Galveston, Texas), however, did not bear fruit.’
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‘After Kristallnacht in November 1938 – the first act of organized antisemitic violence by the Nazi regime – a plan was conceived to resettle European Jews in the vast northern territory of Alaska, which at the time had still not been admitted into the Union. In presenting the plan a few weeks after the pogrom, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes proposed that the underpopulated territory serve as "a haven for Jewish refugees from Germany and other areas in Europe where the Jews are subjected to oppressive restrictions."’
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‘To encourage Jews to move to the district, the Soviet government lifted its ban on private land ownership there, but that apparently was not enough of an incentive. Due to its harsh terrain and climate, Birobijan never attracted a very large number of Soviet Jews, (although thousands of non-Soviet Jewish communists, driven by the dream of a Jewish utopia, settled there in the late 1930s and 1940s).
The Jewish population of the district peaked at about 50,000 right after World War II. Even then, Jews did not account for more than a quarter of the region's population. After the fall of the Iron Curtain, most of the Jews of Birobijan emigrated, mainly to Israel, and fewer than 2,000 are believed to still live in the region.’
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‘They continued to do so even after the English handed over control the colony to the Netherlands in exchange for New Amsterdam, the original name for New York. During this period, these Jews owned more than half the plantations in Suriname. But eventually many of these plantations would hit upon hard times and their Jewish owners left, many of them to North America.
In 1825, the Dutch abruptly ended the special autonomy privileges that had been granted to the Jewish population, and most of the remaining Jews left Suriname after it gained its independence in 1975.’
Read the article here.
Perhaps Alaska or Suriname would have been a safer place. Perhaps.
Birobijan was never very appealing.
I thought that after 1945 parts of Bavaria might have been a solution.
There is always diasporism, see here.